Bitter Medicine Read online

  My right leg felt damp. I looked down and saw I had dropped my wineglass. Champagne had soaked my jeans and the glass lay in chunks on the floor—cheap five-and-dime crystal, it didn’t shatter, just fell apart.

  Lotty wouldn’t know, not unless the hospital had called her. She had a streak of European intellectual arrogance in her—she never read Chicago papers, never listened to Chicago news. All the information she had about the world came from The New York Times and The New Statesman. We’d argued about it before—that’s swell if you live in New York or Manchester. But Chicago doesn’t exist around you? You walk around with your nose in the air and your head in the clouds because you’re too good for the city that gives you your living?

  I realized with a start that I was screaming at Lotty in my head, screaming with rage that had nothing to do with her and little to do with the Times. I had to be angry with someone.

  Lotty answered on the first ring. Dr. Hatcher had phoned her from Beth Israel a few minutes earlier. The news had taken a while to reach the hospital because the friend who found him was an artist, not part of the medical community.

  “The police want to talk to me in the morning. I was his supervising physician, I and Dr. Hatcher together—I guess they want to talk to us about whom he knew—but how could this be done by anyone he knew? Are you free? Can you come with me? Even on such a matter I do not like talking to the police.”

  Lotty had grown up in Nazi-dominated Vienna. Somehow her parents had managed to ship her and her brother to English relatives in 1938, but men in uniform still made her uneasy. I agreed reluctantly—not because I didn’t want to help Lotty, but because I wanted to stay far from the Alvarados and the dead baby, and that meant from Malcolm, too.

  Just as I was climbing into bed my phone rang. It was Carol, troubled about Tregiere. “Diego and Paul and I have been talking, Vic. We need your ideas. You don’t think it could have been Fabiano, do you? He was so crazy the other night. You don’t think he would kill Malcolm because of Consuelo and the baby, do you?”

  I smiled sardonically to myself: No one was going to let me stay away from the murder. “You know, Carol, I really don’t believe he would. How much did he care for Consuelo? And the baby—he was the strongest advocate for an abortion, remember? He didn’t want a child, didn’t want responsibilities. I think he’d be glad to be free of the whole situation.”

  “You would think so, yes, Vic, because you are very rational. But however much people joke about machismo, it is a real thing to some men—he may well feel that a man of honor would act such and such a way, drive himself to a frenzy, and do it.”

  I shook my head. “I can see him having a fantasy about it. But I can’t see him doing it. Still, if you like, I’ll talk to him. Didn’t he hang around with one of the street gangs? Ask Paul—he’ll know.”

  A buzz of talk in the background, then Paul’s voice came on. “The Lions. He wasn’t exactly a heavy member—ran errands on the fringe. You don’t think he’d get them to do a killing for him, do you?”

  “I don’t think anything. I’m talking to the police in the morning—until then I only know what I saw on TV—and that could mean anything.”

  He hung up reluctantly. I frowned at the phone. Not just at the Alvarados but at the idea of getting back into the muck I’d left behind when I quit being a public defender. It was all going to rise up to greet me.

  5

  Station Break

  I slept restlessly, haunted again by Consuelo’s baby. It had rained heavily. The streets in South Chicago were flooded and I made my way to my parents’ house with difficulty. When I came into the living room, a crib stood in the corner with a baby in it. She lay very still, not moving, staring at me with large black eyes. I realized it was my child but that she had no name, that she would come to life only if I gave her my name.

  I woke at five with a shudder, drenched with sweat. I lay with burning, sleepless eyelids for almost an hour, then staggered out for a run to the lake. I couldn’t make myself move at more than a shuffling jog.

  The sun had been up for perhaps half an hour. Lake and sky were bathed in coppery red, a dull, angry color you might expect at the end of the world, and the air hung heavy. The water was mirror still.

  A fisherman stood about twenty feet up the rocks, paying me no attention. I took off my shoes and socks and jumped in in my shorts and T-shirt. Some action of wind and water in the night had stirred the cold depths of the lake and brought them to the surface. I gasped with shock as the freezing water hit my skin, chilling my blood, and I flailed my way back to shore. The fisherman, no doubt thinking drowning a fitting end for those who disturb the perch, continued to concentrate on his line.

  The cold water left me shivering despite the heavy air, but it also cleared my head. By the time I picked Lotty up at her apartment a mile north of me on Sheffield, I felt reasonably able to confront Chicago’s finest.

  We drove to the Sixth Area Headquarters on Belmont near Western. Lotty looked elegant, if subdued, in a navy silk suit I had never seen before. Her usual dress was a schoolgirl-like uniform of white blouse and dark skirt.

  “I bought it in 1965 for my citizenship hearing. I only wear it when I have to talk to government officials, so it is almost new,” she explained, with the ghost of a smile.

  I had dressed professionally myself, in a wheat-colored suit with a silk shirt about the same color. Despite our elegant getups we had to wait nearly forty-five minutes for our appointment. We sat by the duty desk watching officers bring in their first catches of the day. I read all the WANTED descriptions carefully, then went through the citations of merit.

  Lotty’s temper rose as the minutes ticked on, and her nervousness dissipated. She stalked up to the desk sergeant, informed him people’s lives waited in the balance while she sat here, and came back to the vinyl seats with her mouth set.

  “This is what it’s like at the average gynecologist’s office, in case you’ve never been,” I explained. “Because they treat only women and women’s time has inherently no value, it doesn’t matter that the average patient wait is over an hour.”

  “You should consult me,” Lotty said testily. “I don’t keep people waiting. Unlike these cretins.”

  At last a young uniformed officer came for us. “Detective Rawlings is sorry you had to wait so long, but he had to interrogate another suspect.”

  “Another suspect? Are we suspects, then?” I asked as we followed him up a scuffed flight of stairs.

  “I have no idea why the detective wants to talk to you, ma’am,” the officer said stiffly.

  Detective Rawlings greeted us in the doorway of a small interrogation room. He was a solidly built black man about my age. The building wasn’t air-conditioned, and he had loosened his tie and taken off his jacket. As early as it was in the day, his collar and armpits were soaked with sweat. He held out a hand somewhere in between Lotty and me.

  “Dr. Herschel? Sorry to keep you waiting—my seven-thirty appointment went on longer than I expected.” He had a soft voice, rather husky, which tried to say—don’t be afraid of me. Just answer my harmless questions.

  Lotty shook his hand. “This is Miss Warshawski. She’s my attorney—you don’t mind that she sits in with us.” It was less a question than a statement, a little vent of temperament.

  “Not at all, not at all. Warshawski?” He narrowed his eyes. “The name is familiar—”

  “You’re probably thinking of the auto-parts dealer,” I said briskly. The papers have given some of my cases a lot of attention; since many police officers do not like PIs horning in on their territory, I didn’t want to close the door by referring to them. “No connection between the two of us—they spell their name with a y.“

  “Maybe so. But I thought it was something else.” His brow furrowed for a moment; then he shook his head and ushered us into the interrogation room.

  “This isn’t as friendly a setting as I’d like, Doctor, but we’re short on space—I don’
t have an office, so I use what’s available.”

  He took her through the motions on Malcolm Tregiere—enemies, friends, lovers, daily routine, valuables.

  “He had little of value to steal,” she said. “He came from a family with no money, put himself through medical school—you don’t see doctors like that anymore. He was one of a kind.

  “The only person who might rob him would be a collector who knew the value of his Haitian and African masks. But I understand that those were smashed indiscriminately.”

  “Some were. Would you know how many pieces he had—so we could do a count and see if we need to circulate descriptions of ones that are missing?”

  Lotty gave me a questioning look. I shook my head. “I don’t know, Detective—he invited me to his apartment a few times when he was having a group of people over. He might have had twenty artifacts just in the living room. I don’t know about the bedroom—I never saw it. But you might expect thirty or forty items altogether.”

  He scribbled industriously. Thirty to forty was the official number now.

  “You’re sure he had no enemies? What about angry patients?”

  “Rude or arrogant doctors have angry patients. Dr. Tregiere was neither,” Lotty said haughtily, giving a good imitation of arrogance herself. “And his skill was extremely good—the best I have seen in many years. Already the equal of men with many more years’ experience.”

  “The newspeople thought it might be street-gang violence,” I said.

  Rawlings shrugged. “Most of the crime in that area is probably done by gang members. Not necessarily as part of gang activity, but because all the teenagers belong to one.”

  He got up and pointed at a large city map pinned to one wall. “The Garbanzos’ main turf has traditionally been here.” He stabbed at the area southeast of Wrigley Field. “The White Overlords run eastern Uptown. Now the last year, the Garbanzos have been moving into the Hispanic part of Uptown.” His thick forefinger stabbed the area around Broadway and Foster. “But the Lions, another Humboldt Park gang, say that’s their turf. So the Lions and the Garbanzos have been duking it out with each other, and some with the White Overlords. So maybe one of them thought Tregiere was siding with the other. Supplying them with drugs, that kind of thing.”

  “No,” Lotty snapped, dark eyes blazing. “Remove that from your mind. Do not insult Dr. Tregiere by wasting time and money exploring it.”

  Rawlings held up a conciliatory hand. “Just sharing my thinking with you, Doc. There isn’t anything specific to suggest—but I’ve got to think of everything.”

  He probably meant they hadn’t seen Malcolm’s name written upside down on the walls in spray paint. Always a worry to the cops, because it meant the owner’s time had come. In the years I had known Malcolm, I knew he had no connection with the gangs, other than fixing bullet wounds and ODs. But who knew what he’d done as a poor youth when his mother brought him from Haiti to Chicago’s streets? Maybe worth looking into.

  Rawlings was asking Lotty about Tessa Reynolds, the artist who had found Malcolm last night. Lotty continued to be angry and answered contemptuously.

  “They were friends. Perhaps lovers—it wasn’t my business. Did they want to make a life together? Maybe. A resident is a terrible person to be involved with because their time belongs to the hospital, not to their friends or themselves. If she was jealous—which I for one never observed—it wouldn’t be of another woman—he couldn’t have found time for another one.”

  “You don’t suspect her, surely, Detective?” I pictured Tessa, tall, flamboyant, but focused as intently as Malcolm on her work. No person mattered to her as much as her metal statues, certainly not enough to go to jail.

  “She’s a very strong young lady—working with all that metal and stone builds big shoulders. And someone with a lot of shoulder muscle pounded that doctor.” He flipped some garish photographs across to us, a man with his brains battered out. Not Malcolm anymore, a corpse.

  Lotty studied them intently, then passed them to me. “A brainstorm,” she said calmly. If he’d meant to shock her, he’d picked the wrong method. “Whoever did this was mad with rage or inhuman. Not Tessa.”

  I didn’t have quite the lady’s nerves of steel when it came to battered corpses, although I used to see a lot of pictures defending accused murderers. I examined these carefully, looking for—what? The blown-up black-and-whites revealed in excruciating detail the back and left side of the head—a sodden mass—and the angle of the shoulders; also a blowup of bloody streaks on the uneven wood floor—Malcolm had a few throw rugs but no big carpets.

  “He was dragged into the living room?” I asked Rawlings.

  “Yeah. He was cooking dinner when they broke in. You know these apartments—you want to get into one, you break down the kitchen door. So that’s what they did.” He tossed over another sheaf, pictures of the smashed-in door, of rice flung over the floor and stove. No doubt Gervase Fen or Peter Wimsey would immediately have grasped the vital clue revealing the identity of the murderer. But to me it looked like wreckage.

  “Fingerprints? Any kind of indicators?” I asked.

  Rawlings revealed a gold cap in a wide, unamused smile. “The little creeps all wear gloves these days. They don’t know how to read, but they pick it up on TV. We’re sweating the snitches—they’re the only ones going to give us a lead if we find one.”

  “How many you figure were in the apartment?”

  “Two, by the looks.” He took the photographs back from me and pulled out one showing living-room carnage. “Punk One stood here”—he jabbed the right side of the picture with a thick forefinger—“in size-ten Adidas—left the logo on a big swage of rice he’d picked up in the kitchen. Punk Two had bigger feet, but he didn’t leave the shoe designer’s name for us.”

  “So you don’t really suspect Tessa Reynolds, Detective,” I said.

  The gold gleamed again. “Hey, Ms. W.—you a lawyer, you know better than that. We suspect everybody right now. Even you and the doc here.”

  “Not very funny, Detective.” Lotty’s thick brows rose again in hauteur. “I have patients waiting, so if you’ve nothing further?” She swept from the interrogation room: Her majesty was definitely not amused.

  I followed her more slowly, hoping for some last comment from the detective. When it came, it wasn’t particularly helpful: “Now that’s one cold-blooded lady. Doesn’t turn a hair over a murder that made me sick. I can see someone getting pissed enough to off her.”

  There were days when I agreed with him, but I said, “You ever catch a bullet, Rawlings, make sure they take you to Dr. Herschel—they don’t come any better.” I caught up with Lotty at the entrance. We walked silently back to the car.

  As we headed crosstown, Lotty said, “What do you think?”

  “You mean, will they find the punks who did it? It doesn’t seem likely. It all depends on how much bragging they do, how scared the snitches are of them. Your best bet is to get Hatcher and the hospital to keep up pressure on the Sixth Area commander—that’ll keep top resources on the case. This looks very much like a random home invasion, and the only way you crack those is routine.”

  “Fabiano?”

  “I know, I know—Carol and Paul both think his machismo got the better of his tepid interest in Consuelo and he murdered Malcolm to prove he was a real he-man, protecting his woman. But that little squirt? Come on.”

  “Nonetheless, Vic, do me a favor: Look into it.” The black eyes were demanding—not friend to friend but head surgeon to neophyte.

  My hackles rose slightly. “Sure, Lotty, to hear is to obey.” I braked hard in front of the clinic.

  “I’m being unreasonable? Yes, perhaps, I am. Malcolm mattered to me, Vic. More than that sad child or her intolerable husband. I need to be sure that the police do not just sweep this under the rug—put it into their unsolved-crime book.”

  “File,” I corrected irritably. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, trying to contr
ol my impatience. “Lotty, this is like—like a cholera epidemic. You wouldn’t think you could cure that—you’d call in the state public-health people and leave it to them. Because they have machinery and resources for treating epidemics and you don’t. Well, Malcolm’s death is like that. I can check on a few things, but I don’t have the technology or the people to grind through a hundred spouts, and follow up five hundred false leads. Malcolm’s death is really, truly, a job for the state.”

  Lotty stared at me fiercely. “Well, to use your analogy, if one friend I loved was dying in this epidemic, I would treat him, even if I couldn’t stop the plague. And that’s what I’m asking on Malcolm’s behalf. Maybe you can’t solve the crime. Maybe the epidemic of gang violence is too big for anyone, even the state, to solve. But I am asking you, friend to friend, for a friend.”

  I felt as if I were choking under my silk collar. The image of the baby, gasping for air, swept across my mind again. “Yeah, okay, Lotty,” I muttered. “I’ll do what I can. Just don’t sit up nights waiting for the fever to break.”

  I barely waited for her to shut the passenger door before squealing to the corner and roaring down Irving Park Road. I cut across a madly honking van at the entrance to Lake Shore Drive and accelerated hard in front of a sweep of oncoming cars. A barrage of horns and screaming brakes made me feel momentarily effective. Then the stupidity of venting my frustration in a lethal machine overcame me. I pulled over to one of the little turnouts where you can change a flat tire and waited for my pulse to settle down.

  The lake lay to my left. The polished mirror surface was streaked with a light and color that would have inspired Monet. It looked at once peaceful and inviting. But its cold depths could kill you with merciless impersonality. Soberly, I put the car into gear and headed slowly into the Loop.

  6

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